Re: [orca-list] Moving forward on Firefox

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

What I think you will find if you rely 100% on the native Gecko caret
navigation is that certain areas of a page will get skipped over
completely.

Something I've wanted to do at some point in Orca is change the Gecko
script to heuristically identify when Gecko is likely to get things
right (e.g. within a single text object) and when it is likely to get
things wrong (e.g. going from a text object to a list which is in a
float). If we could work that out, Orca would be much more performant
when providing access to Firefox content.

In the past, when caret navigation problems in Gecko have been raised to
the Mozilla folks, the response has largely boiled down to: "It's a
really hard, fragile problem that touches lots of areas of code for all
users so we can't really fix it currently. Sorry!" As a result, we
rolled our own within Orca.

Bill (and others): If you are able to solve the various and sundry caret
navigation problems on the Gecko side of things, we'll be able to rip
out a lot of code in Orca. So, I say good luck and godspeed. <smile>

--joanie

On Mon, 2010-04-05 at 05:18 -0400, Bill Cox wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 4:29 AM, Jason White <jason jasonjgw net> wrote:
> > So, my first question is whether the Mozilla rewrite touches the code in
> > Gecko that lies at the heart of the problem, and if so, whether this opens
> > up an opportunity for a more reliable implementation that can also lead to
> > simplification on the Orca side. I also have suspicions that implementing so
> > much of the caret navigation in Orca itself is a performance problem, as
> > evinced by delays that occur when navigating large and complex Web pages.
>
> Yes, I believe the code that has been so problematic has been mostly
> rewritten, and is now in much  better shape.  It is possible that we
> could disable "Grab focus on objects when navigating", and "Use Orca
> caret navigation".  I don't know what causes delays in Orca when
> navigating large web pages, but I do think we need to improve the
> performance if possible.
>
> Bill
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